User:Kkenya/Kenyas Sandbox

Afshin Naghouni  is an Iranian-born, British visual artist. He is known for his controversial, larger-than-life paintings. Full of life and movement, he works in an expressive style that explores every aspect of each object in his larger-than-life paintings.(needs citation formatting from picassomio)

Naghouni won a number of regional and national painting competitions between the ages of nine and twelve. He started painting and drawing when he was four or five years old. At the age of 9 he went to his first oil painting class. At that age he was emulating the old paintings of Caravaggio, John Constable and others.

Naghouni won a number of regional and national painting competitions between the ages of nine and twelve. He started painting and drawing when he was four or five years old. At the age of 9 he went to his first oil painting class. At that age he was emulating the old paintings of Caravaggio, John Constable and others.

When Naghouni was 24 years old, the Iranian police raided a party he was attending. He managed to escape to the roof of a residential block. During his attempt to come down, he fell to the ground from the sixth floor. He injured his spinal cord, which left him in a wheelchair. This event was the subject of the 2014 TV documentary Out of Focus.

Three years later Naghouni was in England in a hospital that specialized in spinal trauma care. Upon arrival to the United Kingdom, he applied for political asylum. The government provided him with healthcare and housing after he was discharged from hospital to a nursing home, where he lived for over two years.

After he was granted asylum, he applied for a grant from The Prince's Trust, which offered him an interest-free loan to start a business. For the next five years or so he kept working, but his pieces weren’t selling. About that time or a little after was the beginning of his rise in the art world. (needs citation).

In 2015 London-based hip hop artist Antix released a song entitled Afshin’s Song The lyrics are based on the events that led up to and after Naghouni's fall that damaged his spinal cord. Antix also created a video to accompany the song.

In a 2020 interview with Maryam Eisler, Naghouni said that Picasso was the historical figure who affected him the most. Picasso appealed to him because of his carefreeness. "I will always be in love of his analytic period, but I am also very much enjoying the paintings he did of his lover Marie Therese around 1932-33. I love the freedom of application and the loose strokes, childish, free and sensuous at the same time."

Within his mixed-media paintings, Naghouni uses large canvases with layers of oil, resin and glossy photographic images. Naghouni’s work ranges from the historical nostalgia images of Marzabotto to paintings that use semi-nude photographs from the early 20th century as their inspiration. The point of my work is not to send a sort of powerful message, the point of my work is to make my audiences stop and question what they see, and to become challenged by my work – and if that happens to people then I think I have done my job as an artist.

Naghouni studied art in Tehran and London, completing his postgraduate work at London Metropolitan University, in the Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media and Design.

As of 2011, he was the chairman of the Westminster Action Network on Disability.